Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Taxidermy-based art has been all the rage for the last few years. And with it has come raging debate in tow. Is it wrong for an artist such as Nathalia Edenmont to use the heads of dead cats and rabbits in her work? Some say yes. I'm not a fan, but we must ask ourselves: Are we in the business of censoring our artists whenever they tread on shaky ethical grounds? Is being offended a reason for keeping something from being seen? I guess the fear is that the artist willfully abuses something we generally deem sacred (i.e. life and respect for the dead), and leveraging a certain amount of shock value to assert or promote their own agenda (or career). Why should they have that right? The short answer goes: an artist is a receptacle for all emotions and experiences.

"The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life."

This site is generally about our visceral, inexplicable, and sometimes ecstatic connection to animals and/or artistic representations of animals. It attempts to understand what animals mean to us both as living creatures and as powerful symbols that reach deep into our mind's eye and shape many aspects of our own consciousness.

Anthroporphism is something we seem biologically programed to do. As humans, we are prone to sentimentalize objects, ideas, and of course, animals to fit our perceptual, behavioral, and emotional apparatus. Since we can never fully comprehend the inner life of an animal, how shall we treat their "otherness" as we share life on Earth together? With respect to be certain. Still, we are left with our own skewed and humanized impressions, which manifest over and over in our culture - powerful reminders of our chosen "departure" from the nature and our animal cousins.